Syfy Plans to Repeat ‘Sharknado’ After the Show Sets Off a Star-Studded Social Media Feeding Frenzy — Is a Sequel in the Works?

Syfy’s new title-tells-all TV movie "Sharknado" might have gone away quietly had it not been for social media, but after the Internet erupted in a feeding frenzy of posts about what Deadline.com calls the production’s "bad special effects and even worse acting," Syfy plans to bring it back — and is now talking about a sequel.

"Everyone — and by ‘everyone’ we mean The Reporters Who Cover Television and the suits over at Discovery Channel who probably just saw their Shark Week franchise turned into a ratings minnow by the Syfy schlockflick — was waiting Friday morning for the Nielsen ratings on the movie, in which the ecological nightmare caused by global warming triggers a freak weather system that results in a mega tornado choc-a-block with angry sharks who sail through the air attacking innocent children and blondes, and causing to be uttered such lines as ‘they took my grandfather, so I really hate sharks," Deadline reports. "The movie culminates in a mano-a-sharko scene, in which our hero, Ian Ziering is swallowed by a flying shark but, happily, has his chainsaw with him at the time; he saws his way out and rescues the distressed damsel who’d earlier been consumed whole by same shark."

Just how crazy did the Internet go? Deadline reports: "Because it’s social media, real numbers vary wildly — so what else is new? But Syfy is going with these, which are good enough for us: Sharknado clocked 5,000 tweets a minute at its peak — TV’s most social program for the evening and the NBCUni cable network’s most social telecast ever. With 387,000 social mentions, 97% driven by Twitter, ‘Sharknado’ bested such competitive programming as CBS’s racial-slur-riddled ‘Big Brother,’ and came within 2,500 tweets of HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ wedding episode."

Syfy made this announcement this morning: “Given the enormous popular demand, Syfy will present a special encore presentation of ‘Sharknado’ on Thursday, July 18 at 7PM (ET/PT)."

A number of celebrities commented on the movie, Deadline notes, including Mia Farrow, who "tweeted a photo of herself with Philip Roth with whom she said she was watching ‘Sharknado.’ Maybe Roth did not appreciate the gag — anyway, the photo that had been taken of them at a dinner party days earlier, vanished at some point," Deadline reports.

A few other celeb comments noted in the Deadline report:

From Greg Berlanti: “Somewhere in Hollywood there is a senior executive yelling at a junior executive for not coming up with #Sharknado first.”

Damon Lindelof offered: “This movie is such a ripoff of The Bicycle Thief.”

And this one from Michael Chiklis: “Oh Goddamn it, now I want to see it too and then I’m gonna want to quit this business…again!”